Prose | Kamiel Choi

Ex machina

This is one of the better science fiction films made in recent years. The main idea, that the brilliant mind behind the fictitious "Google" called Blue Book harnesses the intelligence of humankind and feeds it to a neuronal network to create strong AI comes across convincingly. There is a modest amount of techno talk, the ...

Miraculous Miru

The book "Gone Girl" by Gillian Flynn (and the movie with Ben Affleck and Rosamund Pike) is a character study of a girl, Amy, who had been spoiled to such an extent that she developed a very specific psychopathology. Amy was the only child of a couple that derived a dangerously large proportion of their ...

We need…

to find meaning, not in what we are doing, but in the superlative of what we do.

Monetizing Facebook the Civilized Way

It took me a few weeks after the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and the public outcry for theoretical "freedom of speech", but today I arrived at a fresh idea. It pertains to this world's largest virtual territory, with more than a billion inhabitants - Facebook. Today, Facebook is a multi-billion dollar marketing machine. The money ...

Dialectical Hypocrisy

1. It's Sunday so I would like to describe the history of our civilization as the dialectical process of overcoming hypocrisy. I don't believe in interpreting historical development in a Hegelian way as the embodiment of a purely logical principle, and to be honest I lack the intellectual vigor to pursue such an endeavour. But ...

Reading of Jeremy Rifkin: The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism

When a very experienced author like Rifkin presents his ideas on how the Internet of Things changes everything, we can expect an abundance of beautifully crafted sentences. Since the mind of a budding reviewer might suffer from scarcity thereof, I have decided to quote a lot from the book. Explorations of the topic of abundance ...

Collaborative Anti-Consumerism

The word "consumerism" seems to imply that the act of consuming is the essence of our being, something more profound than what existentialism or Freudianism were hinting at. I understand that pushing a shopping cart and loading it with things that we decide all by ourselves to pick from the shelves can occasionally give us ...

And (what if) I say, that it is this culture of excessive individualism that has created the constellation where "community" is perceived as some kind of higher purpose, and our "ego" as something low, something we need to be ashamed of. If community is our true value, the individual would be celebrated as the valuable ...

Let’s call it a day

Suppose a respected scientific magazine would have written in October 1962 during the Cuba missile crisis, that a blow-up was inevitable, or even that the rockets were already in the air. Would the public just shrug it off and go about their business? But this is not the 1960s. In our "information" age, the intensity ...